Investigation of membrane fouling during microfiltration of wood components

Development of efficient separation processes are crucial for the realisation of the biorefinery concept, which is important to enable the substitution of fossil raw materials for production of materials and chemicals. Membrane filtration as a pressure driven operation has the potential of being a very energy efficient separation method in this application. However one of the largest challenge when using membranes for separation is fouling and these fouling problems can be expected to very severe for the streams in the biorefinery. This project investigates how fouling deposits are formed and affected by particle-particle and particle-membrane interactions as well as by process conditions during microfiltration of small lignin and cellulose particles.